flying nightmares, The

Flight Journal, Jun 1998 by Rychetnik, Joe

A long time ago, there was a war a lot of folks have since forgotten. It was called the Korean Police Action, and it was fought by a bunch of kids and WW II vets. I was one of the vets in Marine fatigues and served with the VMF (N) 513.

Looking at it from this long-distance perspective, I find it interesting that I don't remember the fear nearly as well as I remember the laughter. I don't remember the hardships nearly as well as I remember the feeling that we were just a bunch of young guys given a lot of whiz-bang airplanes with radarscopes and told to go find the bad guys in the dark. Mostly, what I remember are the amazing ways we found to foul up without hurting anyone, while at the same time trying to fight a war. Excuse me-a police action.

Most early Korean War pilots were on the re-learning curve after having been put back in the saddle. It had been a long layoff since the last big shooting match. Plus, most were just learning the quirks of hunting in the dark by radar. It was tiring work. Corsair pilots, stressed out by the threats of combat and frustrated by flying in an inky environment with tricky radar equipment, were always ready to get the mission over, set their "U" Birds down and hit the sack. First order of business, however, was to land without killing themselves or anyone else on the base.

Several times, Corsairs had landed and, after parking, had accidentally dropped live ordnance or fired their guns. For this reason, the ground crew and those living in the tent camps were more than nervous every time an airplane landed. With this in mind, the rule at the strip was for pilots to drop their tailhook immediately after parking their planes. As the tailhook dropped, it automatically turned off the power to the master arming switch and rendered the dangerous part of the airplane safe.

After warning one young pilot three times, the squadron skipper told him that if he failed to drop his hook one more time, he would find his butt grounded-or worse. On his next flight, nervous from a long night-interdiction mission, that pilot decided to make sure he wouldn't forget: he dropped his tailhook while he was still on final approach.

He landed, taxied the Corsair to the parking area and jumped out, ready for a debrief and bed. The plane captain, an old-timer, stared in horror at the rear of the aircraft. Dozens of electrical cables were wrapped around the tailhook, and hundreds of feet of cable with uprooted runway lights trailed behind the airplane. The dragging tailhook had ripped up all the surface-level electrical cables to the runway lights and dragged the entire mess after it.

Then there was the time Ordnance Sgt. Rene Wattelet, now a retired corporate executive in Stonington, Illinois, glanced up and saw two navigation lights coming at his ordnance shack at the end of the runway. He was there to check each returning nightfighter for dangling ordnance and to give the pilot a "thumbs up" if he was clean. This night, however, instead of seeing the green starboard light of a normal incoming plane going past, he was shocked to see two navigation lights coming at him. He instantly took a running dive into the bomb-shelter trench near the shack.

Wattelet wasn't surprised to hear crunching sounds as the airplane touched down and the engine abruptly quit. The pilot had landed perpendicular to the runway and flipped over on his back. When asked how he happened to come in at 90 degrees to the runway, the pilot said, iI dunno. I guess I screwed up."

Wattelet recalls Corsairs coming in with armed and dangling bombs that fell off on the first bounce of the landing-in one case blowing the tail off the plane. Often, the bombs would drop onto the runway, bounce and then blow a crater in the surface, spraying rocks and fragments everywhere.

At one point, the squadron was the guest of an Air Force F-80 Shooting Star jet fighter squadron. The Zoomies had nothing but contempt for the Marines who flew at night, woke them up and were constantly blowing holes in their runway. One night, a duty fighter was loaded for bear with ten HVAR 5-inch rockets on the wings, two 500-pound bombs and a belly tank hung on the centerline. It was the last in a four-plane flight and had just been given "the thumbs" up from Wattelet prior to takeoff.

The heavily loaded Corsair had barely made it into the air when the pilot retracted the gear. Unfortunately, the plane mushed back down on the center tank with a squish of avgas. An Air Force crash truck rolled up and was about to start spraying foam when someone yelled at the crash-truck guys to get the hell out as there were two 500pounders in the fire. They gave up the idea of being brave and raced away.

One by one, the fire cooked off the HVARS, which went screaming down the field and into the night sky.

Just as the last rocket cooked off, Air Force mechanics a mile down the runway were towing a newly repaired F-80 out of a hangar. The rocket struck the Shooting Star just aft of the cockpit and blew its tail off. Wattelet said the Air Force colonel in charge of the base was fuming and gave the Marines 24 hours to get out, and not a minute more. He claimed his strip had been damaged more by the Marines than by the enemy.